Posted on 11/16/2009 6:26:41 PM PST by mom aka the evil dictator
SAVANNAH, Ga. – An Army cook and single mom may face criminal charges after she skipped her deployment flight to Afghanistan because, she said, no one was available to care for her infant son while she was overseas.
Spc. Alexis Hutchinson, 21, claims she had no choice but to refuse deployment orders because the only family she had to care for her 10-month-old son — her mother — was overwhelmed by the task, already caring for three other relatives with health problems.
Her civilian attorney, Rai Sue Sussman, said Monday that one of Hutchinson's superiors told her she would have to deploy anyway and place the child in foster care.
"For her it was like, 'I couldn't abandon my child,'" Sussman said. "She was really afraid of what would happen, that if she showed up they would send her to Afghanistan anyway and put her son with child protective services."
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
I don’t think women should be in combat especially if they have an infant at home to take care of.
I would be willing to bet that there is more to this story than we're reading. Either the soldier in the story has a history of disciplinary problem or the unit has already had a problem with this issue.
I would guess that this woman missed the first rotation of her unit because of her pregnancy and the unit had to find a replacement. She was probably warned that she wouldn't be allowed an additional exemption and decided to try to get one anyway.
This soldier should be removed from the military. Despite her issues, there is a discharge regulation covering “failure to be available for worldwide deployment.” The army is not a family care service...it is a military service.
While it is possible that her mother backed out of an agreement to care for her child at the last minute, my years of service counseling with just this type of thing make me suspicious. It’s too easy to play the system with this kind of issue.
In any case, that is why the discharge is necessary. The military doesn’t have the time or resources to deal with these issues.
The bottom line is that it is unfair to all the other troops in the military that some get out of paying their deployment dues by virtue of last-second problems. What goes unsaid is that that unit has a gap in its roster now that will go unfilled for a bit until the military taps some other soldier on the shoulder and says, “I know it isn’t your turn to go again just yet, but so-and-so backed out, and now you and your family have to bite the bullet.”
What this soldier has done is entirely unfair to her fellow soldiers, and it injures morale throughout the force.
My son texted me from Iraq and said this is a HUGE discussion among deployed troops. Any one of them with families could have concocted some scheme to do the same thing.
Happens all the time. When I was active duty, it used to piss me off how people were given an entire day of special liberty to take their spouse to the doctor or some concocted pseudo-crisis at home. Sure must be nice to be home at 10 AM chillin’ in front of the TV while other people are doing your work. I was a single guy, I didn’t rate having personal problems or luxuries like the occasional Christmas/Thanksgiving off.
When I was in the Navy in the late ‘80s, women who got pregnant were out faster than spit through a trumpet. I don’t know what kind of discharge it was.
I agree with you, I really do. I have no problem with women doing most jobs, but the military is different. You can leave all the womens’ lib stuff at the front gate. Our military is so screwed up because it has become the biggest women’s/diversity/mommy program on earth. It is totally pathetic.
To those of us who still honor the oath we all once made, it is all but inconceivable that those popularly elected to lead, are the very ones “we” may have to destroy, as enemies.
You may choose to name the reason as whatever prompts you to action.
Hopefully, you are very far away from me and mine, when we decide we must act.
I would never trust one such as you at my side, let alone at my back, in battle.
Whatever. Being one who has actually served (and got an honorable discharge, and being one of the minority who actually served the full length of my enlistment contract), I have the views that I do after having to spend YEARS sucking it up for people who always found an excuse to be somewhere else when the real work starts and found a way to transfer/discharge out early. Like my views or not, I’m not one of them and I never quit on my guys.
As one who actually served two entire lengths of active duty enlistment,and having been honorably discharged twice, with no discernable record of “sucking up” for inferior superiors to mar my own conscience....I say you quit on your guys a long time ago, and continue to this day for your own egocentric reasons.
Like I said before, I would not trust you at my back.
The weeding out of those not quite fit to serve remains a continuous duty for all NCOs, in all military branches.
Not a pleasant job, as these people are individuals who would be considered highly qualified in a civilian environment, absent the goal of efficiently dealing death and destruction to our enemies as our primary military mission.
But hey, whatever.
I never quitted on any of my missions, and “my guys” never had cause or reason to ever doubt my own personal views.
Some, perhaps even most, may not have “liked” me, but most, perhaps even all, understood that I would never allow any of them to risk their lives to cover up incompetence elsewhere in our chain of command.
It’s official, you’ve lost me. I’m a suck-up for not quitting on my job? I (and others in my unit) are suck-ups for having to take extra duty for people who were bagging out early (including my E-6 supervisor, who would go home at lunchtime “to take my wife to the doctor” and not return until the next morning even though it was his 24-hour duty day)? I’m a suck-up for not fabricating crises at home for time off? And to top it off, I’m egocentric for being proud of my service and not using a wife or kids as a tool to acquire special liberty or get out of my enlistment contract. Wow, that’s some brilliant psychoanalysis there. Since you think that doing your job is “sucking-up”, you’ve got some real problems in life.
When I was in the Navy from 1988-1994, the percentage of Navy sailors who finished their full enlistment was 33%, so bitch at one of the 66% that didn’t finish. It’s PC thugs like you that are eroding the military and turning into a maternity ward/part-time employment program instead of a fighting force.
In the Reagan Navy, my brother, on a destroyer tender in the Pacific, saw his ship/shore rotation go from 3 years/3 years to 5 years/1 year when the Navy opened his specialty to women. Navy machinist women at sea often hated the watches and the work and got very pregnant very early into their first cruise in order to get the mandated shore duty for expectant mothers. In the military, years ago, and in the factory where I work now, the pregnant/childcare solution is, almost always, special treatment for the pregnant/childcarer, and the rest of you will hafta take up the slack.
Yep, that's what I thought. Adopted military kids are like cats - if you keep feeding them, they keep coming around. They tell 5 friends, who tell 5 friends, and so on, and you end up emptying the store shelves of Gold Medal flour and Dixie Crystals sugar just to keep up with demand.
Oh they happened before deployment. He drags home strays every weekend. We live an hour from his base. It doesn’t even have to be good home-cooked food, just as long as it isn’t chow hall food! The big problem now is the higher ups. I have them complaining because they aren’t getting packages. My son’s ex tank commander was griping because everyone on the tank got a package except him. Son looked at him and said,”Sorry, but you never bothered to meet Mom.”
Last time I mentioned the special treatment women got from the military, I was attacked by a military woman who accused me of wanting women barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen before swearing up and down that women get no special treatment in the military.
It amazes me how blind people can be to what’s going on around them.
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